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By Betsy Black

Time management is my biggest weakness. Between running, school work, and the mountain of extracurriculars I participate in, I don’t have much time to spare. Furthermore, because I’m a teenager, I find thousands of things (facebook) to do instead of sleeping. So more than occasionally, sleep becomes a secondary priority for me.

Though often frustrated by my disregard for a healthy amount of sleep, my coaches have always accommodated my crazy schedule by staying late to run workouts with me or waking up at 5am to get a run in before school when I have to miss practice. However, when my overloaded agenda starts to visibly affect my performance, they let me know. I often hear, “If you had just gotten a few more hours,,,” or, “You could’ve had those ten seconds if you’d only,,,”

The Cast of the Wizard of Oz at Bishop Ludden

The winter is the busiest time of year for me. In addition to indoor track, I do ski club and the school musicals. Also, this winter in particular, because I am applying to an irrational number of colleges, each of which requires a unique writing sample, I find that I spend a lot of time writing essays. So naturally, there have been more than a few nights when I haven’t gotten an adequate amount of sleep.

This past week was one of those weeks. After a less than stellar workout one night, my coach pulled me aside. I explained to him that with midterm papers and exams going on, my sleep had once again come second.  In response he gave me some valuable advice. He told me that there are two ways to succeed in running. The first way is to give up everything else and make running my number one priority. The second, and more likely path, is to make sure that the two or so hours I devote to running each day, are devoted to running alone. In other words, as soon as I lace up my trainers, I must forget my school work, college applications, and any other distractions I have, and pour my heart entirely into running.

I have learned (but not yet mastered) two rules of thumb on how to cope with an overloaded schedule. The first is to prioritize. If some of your activities are suffering, it’s likely because you’re spreading yourself too thin. My advice to my fellow scholastic runners is that it’s better to do fewer things excellently than to do many things halfheartedly.

Sometimes sleep is more important. The second lesson is the one that my coach articulated for me this past week. For the portion of your day that you spend as an athlete, you must focus only on being an athlete.